Saturday August 12, 2017

The machines have won again: last night, OpenAI’s Dota 2 bot beat Danil "Dendi" Ishutin at The International, one of the biggest eSports events in the world, and remains undefeated against the world’s top Dota 2 players. The bot was trained by simply copying the AI and letting the two play each other for weeks on end. While this was a less complex, 1v1 battle, OpenAI is working on another bot that could play against and alongside humans in a larger 5v5 battle.

"We’ve coached it to learn just from playing against itself," said OpenAI researcher Jakub Pachoki. "So we didn’t hard-code in any strategy, we didn’t have it learn from human experts, just from the very beginning, it just keeps playing against a copy of itself. It starts from complete randomness and then it makes very small improvements, and eventually it’s just pro level." Not shockingly, Elon Musk was watching along and had some thoughts of his own, calling unregulated AI vastly more dangerous than North Korea.